But Epyc 7601 costs less than half of Xeon 8176. Also power consumption of Xeon is much higher than Epyc and it does not correlate with the TDP numbers given by Intel.

The companies that buy these huge Xeon systems negotiate their own pricing. Think of the list price as Intel's first offer, not anywhere close to what most units will be sold for. Epyc will probably force Intel to reduce average selling price, possibly by a lot. Don't expect to see that reflected in list prices though.

So if Epyc is half the cost on the CPU side, then the 2-socket systems will still be more than competitive in just about everything other than AVX performance since you could spec a 2 socket AMD for a single socket Intel? Am I reading this right?and dual socket AMD should have more thread support in general at a similar price point?

Frankly, the value in AMD might just be in the time saved studying spec sheets. Just pick sockets and core counts, and then as much RAM as you can use.

Is the die as gigantic as the heat spreader would indicate? That's a whopper of a CPU there.

Outside of that, it's a good thing for Intel that they're the "industry standard" because anyone shopping purely on budget right now has to be aiming toward AMD powered systems. Still a big hill to climb given Intel's massive advantage in the arena, but man, that's a lot of heat and power usage.

These seem like a huge step backwards, from the E5-2600v4 to the Gold 6100 processors you're losing either cores or base clock, you can get an E5-269x processor with 3.2-3.6GHz base clock and 14-22 cores, the same core counts in the 6100 processors get you Way, Way slower base clocks (2.6-3.0). The pricing is similar so you're getting a lot less bang for your buck, which is especially brutal with the new per-core licensing for Windows 2016, it means you're going to end up with probably 20% higher overall costs for the same workload.

So if Epyc is half the cost on the CPU side, then the 2-socket systems will still be more than competitive in just about everything other than AVX performance since you could spec a 2 socket AMD for a single socket Intel? Am I reading this right?and dual socket AMD should have more thread support in general at a similar price point?

Frankly, the value in AMD might just be in the time saved studying spec sheets. Just pick sockets and core counts, and then as much RAM as you can use.

So this is what Apple is planning to put in the 18 Core iMac Pro. I didn't believe most publicaitons because Apple specifically called it a Xeon processor.

Now, imagine a Mac Pro with 26 cores! That's going to cost more than my whole photo kit - just for two of those processors with 1.5 TB RAM.

Apple will only configure the iMac Pro with up to 128 GB RAM, so the supported maximum for these Xeons are not an issue or deciding factor as any of them can support at least 6 times that. Whether or not that is a hardware limit or just the maximum Apple offers is anyone’s guess at this point, but as it appears that iMac Pro will not be particularly user-upgradebale even in terms of RAM, it may not matter.

So if Epyc is half the cost on the CPU side, then the 2-socket systems will still be more than competitive in just about everything other than AVX performance since you could spec a 2 socket AMD for a single socket Intel? Am I reading this right?and dual socket AMD should have more thread support in general at a similar price point?

Frankly, the value in AMD might just be in the time saved studying spec sheets. Just pick sockets and core counts, and then as much RAM as you can use.

What is the AMD price for an 8 socket system?

Given that even in dense configurations you'll see dual core blades rather than 8 core racks, I don't see AMD current lack of more than 2 CPU configurations being a massive problem. Dual socket covers a pretty big chunk of the server market. Intel can afford to go after more niche markets that AMD can't throw the R&D at.

Bronze isn't a precious metal.It's not even "a" single metal.It's an alloy.From Wikipedia:"Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12% tin and often with the addition of other metals (such as aluminium, manganese, nickel or zinc) and sometimes non-metals or metalloids such as arsenic, phosphorus or silicon."

But Epyc 7601 costs less than half of Xeon 8176. Also power consumption of Xeon is much higher than Epyc and it does not correlate with the TDP numbers given by Intel.

The companies that buy these huge Xeon systems negotiate their own pricing. Think of the list price as Intel's first offer, not anywhere close to what most units will be sold for. Epyc will probably force Intel to reduce average selling price, possibly by a lot. Don't expect to see that reflected in list prices though.

Agreed but it also applies for AMD Epyc pricing. Isn't it? AMD will be glad to reduce their pricing for large customers. They are selling Ryzen 1700 (8 core part) for less than $300 and an EPYC 7601 has 4 of those dies in a package. So AMD also has large scope for decreasing prices while still maintaining good margins.

Bronze isn't a precious metal.It's not even "a" single metal.It's an alloy.From Wikipedia:"Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12% tin and often with the addition of other metals (such as aluminium, manganese, nickel or zinc) and sometimes non-metals or metalloids such as arsenic, phosphorus or silicon."

Ok, copper. Still not a “precious” metal, but there is quite a bit of copper theft when the economy slumps, so I guess it is precious enough.

No wonder it costs a fortune...that's A LOT of real estate to potential get mucked up in manufacture. I think that's what I'd argue the advantage AMD has right now with their fairly modular design...."Perfect 8 core chip? That's a 1800x, whoops, this core is a mess, that's a 1600x" and so on. I'm sure the same will apply to the Epyc line. They can just churn out the same chip over and over and just bin them for cost effectiveness.

This sort of thing drives me batty, but apparently there are enough buyers who support this behavior to perpetuate it.

Personally, I'm getting really tired of weeding through tens/hundreds/thousands of SKUs for essentially the same products every time I shop, artificially segmented because marketing departments are populated by degenerate assholes. This is not 'choice' - it's a pointless gauntlet that adds friction to commerce and life in general.

This sort of thing drives me batty, but apparently there are enough buyers who support this behavior to perpetuate it.

Personally, I'm getting really tired of weeding through tens/hundreds/thousands of SKUs for essentially the same products every time I shop, artificially segmented because marketing departments are populated by degenerate assholes. This is not 'choice' - it's a pointless gauntlet that adds friction to commerce and life in general.

I guarantee the multitude of skus reflects bad yields and binning far more than it does market need. Every random SKU represents a failed full yield chip in some capacity.

I guarantee the multitude of skus reflects bad yields and binning far more than it does market need. Every random SKU represents a failed full yield chip in some capacity.

I know about binning, but in many cases Intel (and others) artificially remove features that cost no more to implement (the engineering has already been done) for the sake of market segmentation. Or other times manufacturers will include features A, B, and D in one SKU and A, C, and E in another, and then A, B, and E, etc. No functional reason - just pure marketing.

Which is certainly their right, but when deciding whether to populate their catalog with 5 items or 25 items of essentially the same product (Hello, Samsung), that's the pain that I'm talking about. Consolidate everything to Good, Better, and Best when possible and gun for volume on each.

Hmm, well it will be interesting and quite possibly entertaining to watch these two slug it out.

Of course, I must caution that we in the cheap seats can't toss the win to either side. If you are running a server (of significance, not my basement file server) than due diligence means establishing which benchmarks map to your data sets. And, of course, YMMV.

Still, it will be fun. And, as many of you have said, finally AMD is an actual contender once more.

It'll be interesting to see the broader application of AVX512 (Skylake-SP) optimizations, which are assuredly phenomenal in some cases, but as anandtech notes:

De Galas/Cuttress wrote:

For the rest of us mere mortals, it will take a while before compilers will be capable of producing AVX-512 code that is actually faster than the current AVX binaries. And when they do, the result will be probably be limited, as compilers still have trouble vectorizing code from scratch. Meanwhile it is important to note that even in the best-case scenario, some of the performance advantage will be negated by the significantly lower clock speeds (base and turbo) that Intel's AVX-512 units run at due to the sheer power demands

It's nice to see we now have a horserace at both the consumer and server level; hopefully Zen APUs are similarly compelling. Though AMD is 'limited' to dual socket, that's up to 64 beefy cores and 128 threads in two sockets with 8 RAM channels and massive PCIe bandwidth.

Have we seen a picture of how the little edge connector is attached to the system?

Normally those are shoved into an appropriate slot; but you can't really move the CPU that way when it goes straight down into its socket. Is the slot slightly movable? Something other than the usual edge connector arrangement?

It'll be interesting to see the broader application of AVX512 (Skylake-SP) optimizations, which are assuredly phenomenal in some cases, but as anandtech notes:

De Galas/Cuttress wrote:

For the rest of us mere mortals, it will take a while before compilers will be capable of producing AVX-512 code that is actually faster than the current AVX binaries. And when they do, the result will be probably be limited, as compilers still have trouble vectorizing code from scratch. Meanwhile it is important to note that even in the best-case scenario, some of the performance advantage will be negated by the significantly lower clock speeds (base and turbo) that Intel's AVX-512 units run at due to the sheer power demands

It's nice to see we now have a horserace at both the consumer and server level; hopefully Zen APUs are similarly compelling. Though AMD is 'limited' to dual socket, that's up to 64 beefy cores and 128 threads in two sockets with 8 RAM channels and massive PCIe bandwidth.

From a consumer standpoint....if they can release a Ryzen APU with similar performance to the Xbox One X on-board GPU.....look out. That'll be a killer-app in the consumer gaming world. A 4/8 Ryzen core with truly solid on-board graphics in a $300 or so package would be the bees knees.